This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates: review

In this book the battlegrounds for superiority take place in Iraq and inside the characters’ souls.

Joyce Carol Oates Carthage, HarperCollins, 480 pages, $26.99.

Joyce Carol Oates

By James Grainger

Thu., Feb. 13, 2014

“To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.” This haunting line from St. Augustine’s Confessions is referenced only in the title of Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, but the 5th century theologian’s harsh journey from sensual egoism to self-renouncing love is mirrored in every winding plot twist and revelation.

Set in the real-life village of Carthage in upstate New York, the novel follows the aftermath of a 19-year-old girl’s mysterious disappearance in a nearby forest preserve one Saturday night in July, 2005. That girl is Cressida Mayfield, daughter of the town’s ex-mayor, a brilliant but troubled adolescent emotionally hobbled by her family’s prominence and older sister Juliet’s easy popularity. Cressida is known as the smart Mayfield girl, Juliet the pretty one, designations that Cressida’s relentless cynicism and arrogance cannot take the sting from.

When Juliet’s handsome salt-of-the-earth fiancé Brett Kincaid returns from the Iraq War badly disfigured and cognitively impaired from a grenade attack, Juliet’s placid happiness is destroyed. Brett not only calls off the marriage but becomes the prime suspect in Cressida’s disappearance.

Why was Cressida, normally one to avoid a crowd, seen with him at a raucous lakeside bar the night she disappeared? How can Brett explain the bloodstains on his passenger seat when he wakes up the next morning hung over in his car with little memory of the night before? Is it true, as the village gossips and the media hint, that he killed Cressida in some twisted act of vengeance against the Mayfield family?

The novel is narrated through Faulkner-esque inner monologues and scenes that trace the “toxic after-events of a violent crime,” including the eventual conviction of Brett for Cressida’s murder and the disintegration of the once-tight Mayfield family. Cressida’s body is never found, and the reader learns fairly early on that she is alive somewhere, but the real events of that night remain a mystery until near the novel’s end.

Article Continued Below

The most harrowing of the early sections place readers inside Brett’s shattered memories, of the night he perpetrated an act of violence against Cressida and his jumbled recollections of his time in Iraq, where he witnessed atrocities against the civilian population. Oates blurs these memories to keep the reader off guard and to drive home the connections between masculine violence in peace and in war, especially how it is acted out against female victims.

Yet Brett remains the novel’s most sympathetic character. No punishment meted out by the state can match his conscience’s self-mortifying remorse, and his eventual conversion to a kind of non-denominational Catholicism while serving in the prison chapel is handled with great delicacy. Oates is one of the few contemporary novelists who writes convincingly and eloquently of the complex struggles that drive people to embrace religious faith.

In Carthage, faith is not an escape from reality and responsibility, but an embracing of the struggle with one’s best and worst self. Even Oates’s atheistic characters battle with their consciences and with the injustices of a nation in sharp decline, giving the novel a powerful moral immediacy.

It would be giving too much away to detail Cressida’s own journey to harrowing self-knowledge and love, but her eventual acceptance of the limitations and gifts life has bestowed on her grounds the novel’s moving conclusion. Cressida, the agent of destruction who follows the song of “unholy loves” to a far more sinful place than ancient Carthage, comes out the other side stripped of her intellectual and cultural superiority, just as Brett loses his claims to traditional masculine power. It’s hard not to read into their stories a parable of America’s decline on the world stage and at home.

James Grainger’s novel Harmless will be published next spring by McClelland & Stewart.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com